Updated at 10.20
STEPHEN KENNY CONCEDED that his side weren’t at their best in Thursday night’s Europa League loss to AZ Alkmaar.
Qualification to the last-32 of the competition looked to be within touching distance after Zenit St Petersburg’s win over Maccabi Tel-Aviv earlier in the day but a tired-looking Dundalk were unable to come back from Wout Weghorst’s early goal at Tallaght Stadium after a defensive lapse in concentration.
“We’re very disappointed and we can’t get away from that,” said Kenny, speaking after the final whistle.
“To get into the Europa League is huge and to qualify has been an ambition for everyone. Getting there has been brilliant but when you get into a position to qualify from the group, you don’t know when you might get that opportunity again so you want to grasp it.
“We knew a victory would put us in a very strong position, but in the end we didn’t do enough to win the game and we looked like we hadn’t played for a few weeks. That’s how it looked in the first 20 minutes.
He went on: “We started really poorly in the first few minutes and made some mistakes early in the game.
“We just needed to see out that period, that’s how I felt at the time — just see it out and get a foothold.
But unfortunately we conceded a really poor goal from our point of view. I’m really disappointed with the goal.
“I can’t remember us starting a game so poorly but we certainly played well for periods of that first half, when we got back into it and we were unfortunate not to equalise in that period.
“AZ had plenty of chances in the second half and Gary Rogers kept us in the game. I think it was important to keep it at 1-0 as long as we could and we rallied really strongly in that last 15 minutes. We had a lot of the play in that period but just couldn’t get that equaliser.”
With the League of Ireland season finished nearly a month, Dundalk had been without a competitive game since the FAI Cup final on 6 November (although they did have a friendly against Brentford’s reserves last week) and it showed.
It has been a long, arduous campaign for this group of players and injuries and fatigue may finally have caught up on the squad going on tonight’s evidence.
I certainly don’t want to sit here and make excuses but due to the number of injuries we had after that end-of-season schedule, a lot of players couldn’t play or train properly so there was an element of that,” added Kenny.
“I think the players showed good character to come back and keep it alive for as long as we did and we could’ve got a draw. It would’ve flattered us but it wasn’t beyond us and we just have to accept the defeat and make sure that we go to Israel and give ourselves every chance out there.”
Going into the final group game in two week’s time, Dundalk are now joint-third having been leapfrogged by their latest opponents, and they head to Tel-Aviv in search of three points and that runners-up spot.
“The situation that we’re in now is that we have to win and hope that it’s good enough. We know it’s a tough task to go to Israel and win but we’ve beaten Maccabi previously so we can take confidence from that.”
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